Yoná Magalhães

Manoel kneels on a hillside in Bahia and kisses the hem of a preacher's robe, and his wife stands behind him and does not. That is Rosa in Black God, White Devil (1964), and it is most of what Yoná Magalhães is asked to do in the film: watch, doubt, and keep quiet while the men around her shout about God and cattle and the sertão turning into sea. Geraldo del Rey's Manoel believes everything he is told. Lídio Silva's Sebastião believes himself. Magalhães is the only person on screen who looks as though she has weighed the evidence, and while we admired the film for its pictures, she is the reason we cared what happened to anyone in it.

She moved us more than the film seems to intend. Rocha's picture is loud for two hours and louder in the second, and the script hands its arguments to the men; Magalhães argues back with a look, and the look is quieter and more persuasive than anything said aloud. She had little experience of feature films when she made it. By her own account Rocha probably wanted somebody else, trusted his own direction more than her talent, and got a performance out of a beginner; she also said she did not grasp at the time what the film was or would become. We think she is being modest. A director can tell an actress where to stand. He cannot make her face think.

The film is the odd one out in her working life. She had started in the mid-1950s on radio and at TV Tupi in Rio, in small parts and live teleteatro, with stage work that included Nelson Rodrigues, and when she came back to Rio in 1964 she became one of the first actresses under contract at the newly launched TV Globo. There, in Glória Magadan's Eu Compro Esta Mulher (1966), she was paired with Carlos Alberto, and the two of them became the network's first popular on-screen couple; she said the audience leapt and that she never quite understood why. For the next five decades she worked across Globo, Tupi and Bandeirantes in dozens of telenovelas.

We have not reviewed the television, so we will not judge it, but the shape is plain. The romantic lead became the character actress: Mercedes in Os Imigrantes (1981), a part that runs across decades of the character's life; Matilde, the boate owner in Roque Santeiro (1985); Tonha in the Jorge Amado adaptation Tieta (1989); supporting parts until Sangue Bom (2013), two years before she died. That is a long time to stay useful in a medium that discards people quickly.

Most of that work was made for Brazilian evenings and did not travel. Rosa did. If you know Magalhães from one thing, it will be a woman standing behind a kneeling man on a dry hill, not believing a word of it, and that is a good one thing to be known for.